Sunday, March 8, 2015

Adaptation Studies and the "Much Maligned" Case-Study

I’ve recently received two calls for papers that both
imply that there is something intellectually questionable about the case-study
model of adaptation. One describes it as
“much-maligned”; the other calls it “rather
limiting and limited,” especially when compared to the “big questions” of
adaptation, the history of adaptation, and on adaptation as scholarly practice.

Patrick Cattrysse has a lot to answer for. In his recent Descriptive Adaptation Studies (2014) he derides the “endless
accumulation of ad hoc case studies,” which hitherto have dominated much
adaptation studies research, and advocates instead a general focus on “corpus-based
research into wider trends of adaptational behavior and the roles and functions
of sets of adaptations.” He cites my
edited collection Adaptation, Translation
and Transformation (2012) as an example of the former approach, in which
the various contributors offer diverse interventions as to what the terms “adaptation”
and “translation” might signify in various contexts, and how practitioners have
tried to develop a relationship between the two.

What disturbs me about all these
observations is that they assume some kind of binary opposition between the
particular and the general; the particularized “case-study” cannot address the
more “general” questions of adaptation studies and its future theoretical
developments. Such oppositions, I
believe, inhibit rather than benefit future research, as they impose a western-originated
framework on a discipline which, by its very nature, should be transnational in
focus.

My attention was drawn once again to
this issue yesterday, when I visited the Ankara State Museum of Painting and
Sculpture (Ankara
Devlet Resim ve Heykel Müzesi). Opened in 1930 in a purpose-built structure,
it houses a rich collection of Turkish art from the late nineteenth century to
the present day. As in all museums, the
work of individual artists is prominently on display; they include Şeker Ahmet
Paşa, Zekai Paşa, Halil Paşa, İbrahim Çallı, Hikmet Onat and Namık İsmail.

What is perhaps more
significant, however, is the purpose for which the museum was intended. Opened by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, it was
designed to foster the cultural development of the nation by providing an
outlet for artists to show off their work.
This was considered highly significant: many of them had studied abroad,
and Atatürk wanted to show how they had absorbed the lessons of other artistic
traditions (in the west and elsewhere) and used them to create new forms. The exhibits show distinct Impressionist,
Cubist, and Dadaist influences, for instance.

Although the individual artists
adapted their knowledge to create idiosyncratic, often striking works, their
paintings served a more general purpose of advancing the nation’s sense of
cultural well-being. On this view, the
relationship between general and particular is not oppositional but symbiotic;
one cannot exist without the other. As I
walked around the gallery, looking at the paintings with subjects as diverse as
Anatolian landscapes past and present, İstanbul sea-views, Ottoman dignitaries
and Atatürk himself, I could not help but recall how many creative individuals practiced
(and continue to practice) their work in the belief that they are serving the
nation. They might be recognized as
artists in their own right – great actors, film stars, painters, and so on –
but they also claim a higher purpose.

While Ayşe H. Köksal is
right in claiming that this model can be considered exclusivist insofar as it
is designed “not so much to shore up an existing [Ottoman] social order as to
provide the script for a new [Kemalist] one” (although this is not always the
case), the fact remains that the case-study (in this case, the individual
art-work contained within the framework of the Ankara State Museum) tells us a
lot about the relationship between adaptation and cultural politics. Moreover this model is defiantly
transnational; how many other regimes have employed similar strategies in order
to reinforce state ideologies?

In Making Stories (2002), Jerome Bruner offers a model of adaptation
based on an interplay between individuals and the communities they
inhabit. Individuals learn how to “adapt”
to their environments through socialization – learning behavioral, artistic and
psychological conventions. At the same
time they initiate a process of adaptation within their environments through a
variety of strategies, including cultural products such as films, paintings, or
plays. These products can help transform
the way people think about the world around them. This continual process of give-and-take - of
individuals adapting to and at the same time inspiring others to adapt – is how
societies evolve.

To think otherwise – by favoring
a “general” at the expense of a “particular” focus on adaptation - is to re-invoke
a colonialist way of thinking which adaptation studies consciously seeks to
avoid, as its practitioners try and find ways of understanding one another, as
well as looking for transnational and transdisciplinary models.

I appreciate the amount
of work being undertaken in the discipline, but I wish that some of the
thinking could be a little more “out of the box.”

11 comments:

I think the pushback against the case study comes from its domination of the field. Considering other methods to think about adaptation beyond the one-to-one compare/contrast might be thought of as "outside the box." The case study definitely has a place in adaptation studies--I wouldn't want to conceive the field, or even a large project, without it. But I think the reaction against it is a response to what some critics consider an over-reliance on it. The case study has a tendency to invite critics to fall into the part-to-whole fallacy. It's by no means inevitable, but it happens. A lot. To use your example, a case study of a particular work in the Ankara State Museum of Painting and Sculpture could lead to broad critical conclusions about the artist and the community s/he inhabits--after all, the urge to move from individual to communal, form local to global is built into the case study. The problem is that another work by the same artist might completely contradict those conclusions. Could I understand the ways that adaptive socialization works in Turkish art by considering a single work? I think that the problem of the case study is the problem of the small sample size. It's not necessarily that we need to scuttle it, but de-center it at times in favor of more broad-based approaches to and methods of positioning and understanding the act of adaptation.

Your reply invokes precisely the kind of binary I repudiate - you have to decenter one to recenter the other. The Brunerian model offers a workable alternative; the one is the function of the other. To look at one painting in its context of production (or in this instance, reception) is to understand its function in the ideological whole, as well as appreciating its individual merits. So, it's not just a case of moving from individual to communal, local to global, but also communal to individual, global to local. This centrifugal as well as centripetal force is built into the Brunerian model.

I'm not sure we're actually disagreeing here--or our disagreement might be more semantic than substantial. When I say that it's productive to de-center the case study, it's not necessarily to center a more general alternative. I agree, to evoke an either/or approach is a false dichotomy--these approaches need not exist in mutual exclusion. Some case studies do leave room to move from local to global and also global to local--but many unproductively and invalidly extrapolate broad conclusions from narrow inspections.

Fair point. My impatience with many interventions - case-studies, as you term them - stems from an over-preoccupation with textual issues and not enough with the ways in which authors have used the target texts to comment on issues - political, psychological or whatever - in their contexts of production.

EXACTLY! And the over-preoccupation with textual issues privileges a rearview reading strategy that cements the source/copy binary--which makes it even more likely that the political, psychological, social, etc. issues/negotiations that go into the act of adaptation will be ignored.

Agreed. I think a lot of the problem comes from the discipline stemming from English departments. There will always be some critics who focus on textual issues and the backward glance at the "source" (I love your term "target"). But I really think that if we produce interesting explorations of the political, philosophical, social, economic, and psychological implications of the act (and fact) of adaptation, the field is ready to shift in that direction. Call me an optimist.

As the co-author of one of the CFPs mentioned in your blog I feel some small obligation to explain my own feelings about case studies. I’m the co-editor of several case studies, and I can't imagine our field without them. In fact, I don't want to imagine our field without them. Like Glenn I realize that they have been our bread and butter for a long time, and they are useful. But they have also led us into some bad habits. You note some of these above. It doesn’t hurt for us to be reminded occasionally that our methods of scholarship are usually conventions, not necessities. On a more philosophical level I find that case studies are, too often, what Alan Dundes termed “butterfly collections.” In reference to folklore case studies Dundes was critical of the tendency to collect folklore without attempting to trace cause-and-effect relationships, seek correlations, or (to be blunt) to theorize on a macro level. I’m afraid that adaptation studies has been a little guilty of the same thing. So I tend to be tolerant of studies that do attempt to theorize, even with a relatively small “sample size.”

Thanks for your comments, Dennis. I still think both you and Glenn view the entire debate in terms of an 'either/or' model: that AS has to remain caught within the case-studies model or attempt to move away towards more theoretical interventions. I believe that the two are inseparable: if AS is looked at in terms of its conditions of production (or even semantic construction, given that "adaptation" means so many different things in different territories), we cannot help but construct theories from case-studies. This is precisely what Bruner says when he identifies 'adaptation' as an interactional process between individuals and the communities they inhabit. Whenever I 'do' adaptation with my education studies kids, I'm redefining my theoretical models through case-studies; the case-studies in this instance being my classes. My entire Wednesday evenings are devoted to this process.

I admit that I do see it as a bit of an "either-or," but I also see the movement itself from the texts to the contexts, or the particular to the theory, or the close up to the long shot as a really valuable thing. Making that movement is the hardest thing for me as I write, and it's also the thing my students struggle the most with. But it's a skill that is broadly applicable and that they will continue to use all of their lives.